Shatz, Schwartz and Fentin P.C.

Focus and practice areas

The firm works across business and personal legal matters from a base in Springfield, Massachusetts. Its lawyers handle business organizations, estate planning, elder law, and commercial and tax-exempt finance. They also take on real estate and land use, general litigation, and bankruptcy, reorganization and workout.

Several more defined areas appear alongside those. The site lists trust and estates litigation, exit planning for business owners, not-for-profit work, and special education law. Exit planning helps a business owner prepare to sell or hand over a company, which ties closely to the firm's estate and business work. In my opinion the range reads as a regional practice built to serve companies and the families who own them. The firm also points to government-assisted housing programs and to regulatory matters tied to aging, real estate development, business purchases and charitable organizations as long-standing parts of its work.

Roots and reach

Shatz, Schwartz and Fentin was established in 1969 by former legal-services attorneys. The founders came out of legal-services work, which is legal aid for people who cannot otherwise pay for a lawyer. The practice has since grown into business, finance and estate matters, and it carries the founders' names. Gary S. Fentin appears among the attorneys the site lists today.

The firm keeps offices in Springfield and Northampton, Massachusetts, and in Albany, New York. It serves clients across western New England and eastern New York State. Those clients include individuals and closely held family enterprises, business owners and their families, and multinational companies.

How the team is built

The firm has 19 lawyers, and its attorneys page names each of them. Among those listed are Michael A. Deere, Mark J. Esposito, Michele J. Feinstein, Gary S. Fentin, Michael A. Fenton, Ellen W. Freyman, Deborah Jankowski, Carol Cioe Klyman, Joshua Y. Levine, Danielle S. Michaud, Timothy P. Mulhern and Andrea M. O'Connor. Karolina Weagle and Steven Weiss also appear in the firm's materials.

A group of that size can cover distinct fields under one roof, which fits the list of practice areas the firm names. Several of the listed lawyers connect to specific work in bankruptcy, elder law and estate planning. As a reviewer I read the roster as the firm's main asset here, since the depth of a practice usually tracks the people who staff it.

What the bankruptcy practice covers

The bankruptcy, reorganization and workout practice represents debtors, secured lenders and creditors' committees. It handles cases under Chapter 7, Chapter 11 and Chapter 13, and Attorney Steven Weiss supervises the work. Those three chapters serve different goals.

Chapter 7 covers liquidation, where a trustee gathers and sells a debtor's non-exempt assets to pay creditors. Chapter 13 sets up a repayment plan for individuals with regular income, usually over three to five years. Chapter 11 lets a business, and sometimes an individual, reorganize debts while continuing to operate. Representing a creditors' committee, as the firm does, means acting for a group of unsecured creditors who share an interest in how a Chapter 11 case resolves. This general context shows the kind of matters the firm's bankruptcy lawyers handle.

Estate, elder law and special education matters

Alongside its business side, the firm does steady work for individuals and families. Estate planning, elder law, trust and estates litigation, and special education law all appear on its practice list. Two of these areas carry named authors and recognitions, which I cover below.

Estate planning generally covers wills, trusts and the transfer of assets after death, along with tax planning for larger estates. Trust and estates litigation comes into play when heirs or beneficiaries dispute how an estate or trust is handled. Elder law generally covers planning for later life: powers of attorney, health care directives, and questions around long-term care and public benefits such as MassHealth. Special education law generally involves securing services for a child with a disability, often through an individualized education program and, when disputes arise, hearings before a state agency. Naming these as distinct practice areas points to lawyers who work in them regularly.

Recognition and published work

Two of the firm's attorneys co-authored the third edition of Massachusetts Elder Law, published by LexisNexis in 2025. Michele J. Feinstein and Carol Cioe Klyman share that credit. Feinstein was also recognized in the Estate and Probate category and has been selected to the Massachusetts Super Lawyers list for the twentieth time.

Andrea M. O'Connor was recognized in Bankruptcy: Consumer and has been named to the Massachusetts Super Lawyers list for four consecutive years. Karolina Weagle was named a 2026 Massachusetts Rising Star. These recognitions come from Super Lawyers, an independent rating service, and they attach to individual lawyers within the firm.

Publishing a treatise like Massachusetts Elder Law puts two of the firm's lawyers in front of the wider bar that uses such references. For a reader weighing an elder law or estate matter, that authorship is a concrete data point about the depth behind the firm's estate and elder law practice. In my opinion it is the clearest evidence the site offers about the experience of the people doing the work.